The Second Child
By Malcolm Knox
Allen & Unwin
Reviewed by Peter Stupples
Australian writer Malcolm Knox has written a sequel to his satirical novel The First Friend, published in 2024.
That novel centred on the relationship of Soviet political apparatchik Lavrentiy Beria, the soon to be head of the Soviet Security Service, and his close childhood friend Vasil Murtov, who became Beria’s driver and confidant.
Murtov “disappeared” in 1938.
The sequel, The Second Child, focuses on the career of Murtov’s daughter, Melor.
After the disappearance of their father, Melor and her sister departed the Soviet Union for Germany, later shifting to Paris.
When the Germans invaded France, during the period of the Soviet-German Nonaggression Pact, Melor elected to return to Russia in 1941 where Beria “adopted” her as his “ears and eyes” within the Soviet leadership — an open “mole” within Stalin’s inner circle.
Melor has an affection for Beria’s son, Sergo, who also works as an intelligence operative.
But Sergo has eyes only for Svetlana, Stalin’s daughter, but he has the wit to realise that it would be too dangerous a liaison and marries another for self-protection.
All of these characters, fictional and real, are Georgian, including Stalin himself.
They form an intimate clan within the otherwise Russian Politburo.
Yet, within the clan, Stalin and Beria, whilst depending on each other, are also deadly rivals: Beria watches Stalin for weakness, and Stalin both promotes and humiliates Beria.
We are treated to a racy account of inner Soviet contestation for power over the final year of World War 2, the fall of Berlin and Hitler’s suicide, as well as the gamesmanship of the Potsdam Conference in July-August 1945 — all seen through the eyes of Melor.
Knox has done his homework.
Most of the political events keep well to the published facts, including the acute tensions with the Soviet leadership.
But Knox has his own agenda.
He wants to shed light on the amoral character of Stalin and Beria, to have grim fun on their ruthless tenacity to wield power for its own sake.
As satire, however, it falls flat.
The facts are too unbearable to carry laughter.
The fictional figures serve to play their part in a subplot that only emerges towards the end of the novel.
These events begins to skew history to no good fictional purpose, without achieving the wang-bang dénouement that will wow the reader.
Ironically, the best passages in the book are those that show the complex and tragic relationship of Stalin with his daughter Svetlana, and Beria’s loneliness within the Russian wolves of the Politburo.
Here, fiction can make us think between the lines of “history” that has rightly condemned Stalin and Beria without mercy.
For a few moments we are permitted to see them as people who also suffer like the rest of their victims.
Peter Stupples, now living in Wellington, used to teach at the University of Otago.